October 23, 2007

My So-Called Life: The MetroDad 20-Year Reunion

Crazy, right? I know you're sitting there thinking, "Wait,
how the fuck is it possible that MetroDad is having his 20-year reunion?
He's too young! Did he skip elementary school?"

Well, don't let the beautiful hair and
insouciant attitude fool you, my friends. I really am as old as I
pretend not to be.

All kidding aside...

I attended one of those effete NYC private
schools
usually characterized by alumnae with an overabundance of self-worth.
As my older fellow alum and distinguished blogging friend, alice, uptown, opines, "the school is a
factory for over-privileged smart-asses. Ironically, it's an
academic institution that costs over $30K per annum these days -- yet
was named for the founder of free public education!"

See, this was not your typical school where you go back to your reunion, joke about the
football captain who became the bald manager of a bowling alley, or laugh
at the cheerleader who lost her looks and got divorced 5 times.

Shit, this is a school that didn't even have a football team or
cheerleaders.

It's a small school where seven graduates have won Pulitzer
Prizes while many others moved on to become future literary stars, world-class musicians, and captains of industry.

Growing up, it was a sacrifice for my parents to send me there. My father's business was often feast-or-famine and, in
the early years, there was more than one occasion when I remember the
school calling up for that late tuition payment. However, being a
typical Korean immigrant father, he believed that nothing was more important than
his son's education and he was willing to make sacrifices on behalf of it.

However, NYC has changed over the years. In my opinion, private education in this city has been tainted by the influx of hedge-fund riches so outlandish that, for many people, $30K is the equivalent of their annual dry-cleaning bills.

I fully expected to show up to my reunion and be sorely disappointed that the vast
majority of my classmates had turned out to become corporate lawyers or investment
bankers.

And since I love rattling the cages of the creatively mundane, I contemplated imitating my fake girlfriend Amy Sedaris and buying a
special custom-made fat suit. Then, I'd show up at the reunion in a
powder blue tuxedo and introduce myself as "The Donut King of El Paso!"

For a brief moment, I also thought about showing up with a street hooker.

Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised at how my graduating class turned out. More than a few had dedicated their lives to public service and, interestingly enough, many had ended up becoming psychiatrists, artists, doctors, and journalists.

If anything, the reunion made my decision to send the Peanut to public school a little tougher to swallow.

See, on the one hand, I believe I had one of the best educations available anywhere in the country. My alma mater spares no expense when it comes to providing resources for its students. The classrooms, science labs, art studios, music facilities and technology operations are all state-of-the-art. And most students graduate speaking at least 2-3 languages fluently.

However, I'm a firm believer in sending Peanut to public school. Why? Many reasons, one of the most important being that I'm terrified of sending my daughter to a school where the student body believes "Gossip Girl" is based on them.

Besides, if public education is ever going to work in a city like New York, it's
going to involve parents who can afford to send their kids to private
school but choose not to.

That being said, the state of public education in this country scares the crap out of me. Sometimes, I think it's fitting that public schools are
called P.S. because it often seems that they're treated as an
afterthought.

Somehow, we've got to convince all Americans that paying teachers what they
deserve is as good an investment in our future as, say, building more
prisons. My mother spent 20 years as a public-school teacher and, at the end of the day, she probably could have made more money flipping burgers at McDonalds.

I never understood why it's so controversial to compensate teachers better. The only reason I can think of is because society realizes that we've got teachers firmly by the balls. For the most part, these people want to be teachers, and as is often the case in this
country, when we know somebody loves to do something, we fuck them
over on their paycheck, because we figure they're going to do it
anyway.

Shit, we should be thankful that teachers are able to impart ANY lessons to our kids nowadays. As my mom's experience has taught me, being a public school teacher these days is not limited to the
boring educational stuff anymore. Any time you need to go through a metal detector to get to work, you deserve to get paid more than minimum wage.

Now I'm not saying that increasing teacher pay is the solution to solving this country's educational system. I am saying, however, that it's a good place to start.

Personally, I think one of the reasons I want to send the Peanut to public school is because I'd like to test my pet theory that the single most important contribution to a child's education is the role that each parent plays in fostering that education. It seems to me that a lot of kids are going home to parents who are more interested in watching "Dancing with the Stars" than they are in their child's education.

Let me tell you something, my friends. I'm pretty sure that your child's education isn't a fluff-and-fold situation where you can drop the kid off at school, pick him up 12 years later and suddenly he's working on Fermat's Theorem with Marilyn vos Savant. If only it were that easy, right?

Whether you send your kid to public school or private school, none of it will mean anything if you don't get involved in your kid's education. That's why I refuse to give my three-year-old any dessert unless she asks for it in Latin. Besides, my dad used to give me more homework when I was younger than school ever did.

Anyway, all kidding aside, do you want to know the real reasons behind my obsession with education in this country?

I selfishly believe that the decline in our public school system is having a deleterious effect on me personally. I can tell that my readership isn't quite as educated as it used to be. See, I
like to salt my remarks with the best of Shakespearean literature, but I'm
just not getting the response I once did with such pithy observations
like, "Shit, I haven't had a meal that bad since Titus Andronicus invited me and the gang over for dinner to Tamora's house!"

In fact, I'm pretty sure only a handful of readers are going to even get that joke ("Help me, Dutch-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.")

Anyway, I'll stop babbling now. I just want to end this nonsensical rant by saying that if our schools don't start doing their jobs better, I'm going to have to resort to getting laughs on this blog just by saying the word "Motherfucker!"

And we wouldn't want that to happen, would we? MOTHERFUCKERS!

By the way, for those of you who have e-mailed me privately asking about the reunion, my replies are as follows:

(1) Fat but not bald.(2) Chicken fingers, a veggie burger, and a little weed.(3) Not Cindy Crawford. More like Joan Crawford. (4) 3:00 am.(5) Echo & the Bunnymen

Comments

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Feeling aged, but appreciate the mention.

Actually, you live in the high rent district du jour: the P.S. 6 cachment area has nothing on Tribeca. I'm guessing the parental donations sweepstakes there are huge for the single-digit-age set, and the school's got to be newer than most.

My 25th reunion had more than its share of I-bankers and corporate lawyers, not to mention doctors who couldn't find their way out of a mismanaged care box.

If you'd showed up with a tranny street hooker, I'd have been proud -- that would have made for real entertainment. You couldn't have kept me from tagging along to do the photo-op honors.

Up on the hill, maybe things have changed. As I remember, in the mid-1970s, having an X chromosome marked me as being a radically diverse student (30 of 150 of us in my class).

Private, public -- doesn't anyone know private school teachers don't have to have any formal teaching creds? Not that I'm sure what teaching creds have to do with imparting knowledge, but the pay sucks, too. Anywhere the kids drive better cars than the faculty shows that.

If you want the Peanut to meet the kind of people I cross the street to avoid, maybe our alma mater as I knew it is the place to be. "What'd'ya get?" was our class expression in the yearbook. Competitive fools, weren't we? Can't see how that could have improved in the last 30 years.

She could grow up to be governor. His 3 kids have only seen the public school system as a drive-by.

I haven't read the entire comments thread, but I do have several comments to make.

To the person who said it was "easy" to become a teacher. That depends on the state. Massachusetts requires a Masters degree, and a ridiculous number of tests to become certified. The sheer number of hoops I've jumped through is absurd, and expensive considering each test is over $100. I'm lucky in that I've never had to retake an exam-many do.

My husband has an equivalent degree and makes triple to quadruple what I make as a teacher. He puts in around 60-75 hours a week. I do as well, sometimes more when you factor in all the grading, phone calls home, and lesson planning. So I wouldn't argue that he works harder than I do.

As a public school teacher who is moving to NYC in a few months, and a future mom, my husband and I have argued back and forth about the whole public/private thing. Like you, we probably won't go private because we don't want our kids to have the values they'd learn at a typical NYC private school.

However, we are strongly considering homeschooling them until they get into an exam school, or moving to the high end suburbs outside of manhattan before 7th or 8th grade. There are probably charter schools that are acceptable, but I'm just not sure I can put my children into a regular NYC public school.

I've taught in Boston for 4 years, and our game plan was to buy a home in a high test score/wealthy suburb before our kids got into school. City schools, I'm so sorry to say, just plain suck.

I agree that the city schools won't get better until parents get involved, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily want to sacrifice my own kids on that altar. My alternative is to do it, and breathe down the neck of the school. I know the tricks they'll try to pull, and all the counter moves.

At any rate, I don't think things will be any better in 5 years, and I can only hope that by then my husband will have been transferred to London or Tokyo.

My kid is in public school and I'm reasonably happy with it, though conflicted. I'm not really one to throw my kids under the proverbial bus just to make a greater social statement, but I do totally agree with you that parenting is what makes the difference in educational success or lack thereof. And also agree that high quality public education is critically important and worth sacrificing other things for (just maybe not my kids ;)).

Our eldest is 9 and in a NYC Public School G&T program on the UWS and I went through exactly what you discuss here. And we did it again with our second who is now 6. We have been delighted to this point. I do have to say though, we have a very active and engaged parent body. It is interesting to note that in sheer numbers, the G&T parents are far more actively involved.

As the Board of Ed makes changes to right some wrongs, we are watching closely. The intent of the changes is understood and fully supported - but the execution defies belief. One of your commentors brought up catchment. NewsFlash: that was removed for the G&T program (as was sibling preference) to be replaced with what? A system that arguably makes the strong schools stronger . How? By allowing parents to select their top 3 choices and test scores rank the kids. Where you fit in the pecking order, determines which of your 1, 2 or 3 choice you get. So the highest scoring kids go predominantly to the highest rated schools - within reason. The second issue with this, is that by potentially splitting families where 2 kids may test into the G&T program, and 1 gets choice 1 and the other choice 2, how do you drop off and pick up 2 kids at the same time and different places? And what happens when our little 3.5 year old peanut tests in and we potentially have 3 at 3 schools? Choices are not attractive:
1. 3 in private
2. 2 nannies
3. both wife and I stay home (non-starter - need the income)
4. leave the city.

There is a lot wrong with the NY City Public School system - with the administration/Board of Ed often at the center. Some things like the bifurcation of the schools between the G&T and regular programs and the the disparity of PS by neighborhood are not easily fixable.

Many of the parents who "can afford private but choose public" have and are subsidizing the Public School where their kids are . They have actively "invested" in their kids both in money and time. The money often helps provide assistants and books equipment and other items that help teachers do their important jobs. It is important to note that the "help" is pooled in a grade and not kept by class or program. And then the gut check - What about schools where the parent body can't afford to help?

I often wonder how many parents who "chose" Public would have made other choices if their Little Johnny had not tested in to the geographically desirable G&T program. I would expect many.

What a fantastic chain of comments. Well worth reading from start to finish. Great conversation - thanks.

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I believe they can. But you would need to get all the reeeirqmunts before you could teach and it also depends if you want to teach at a Catholic/Public/Private school! I'm not sure if you need to take any courses? I would look into it now for next school year!

When you get the requirements to teach you will have to major and minor in a clarifitbee area. Nursing is not an option. You may choose something like biology or health, for example. Whatever areas you major and minor in, you will be able to teach.